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Peter Toren | Experienced Intellectual Property Lawyer

PToren’s Blog Posts

Stakeholders Speak Out on Google v. Oracle

First published in IPWatchdog.com The most interesting aspect of the Google v. Oracle case is that the court failed to address the issue of copyrightability, however, given the court’s approach to fair use it is uncertain as to whether this really matters. In short, the decision is likely to come as a big relief for the tech…

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Ninth Circuit Gives Guidance on Specification of Trade Secrets Under the Defend Trade Secrets Act

This was first published in IPWatchdog on February 2, 2021. “The court found that the identification of trade secrets is an ‘iterative process where requests between parties lead to a refined and sufficiently particularized trade secret identification.’” Two of the most important issues in trade secret cases involve the timing of when the plaintiff is…

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Department of Justice’s “China Initiative:” Two Year Recap

This was first published in IPWatchdog on January 3, 2021.  “The Biden administration and the DOJ should review the China Initiative to determine whether prosecutions and investigations are based on the race, ethnicity or ancestry of the targeted individual, and if so to take remedial action to prevent such profiling in the future.” One of…

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DOJ’s “China Initiative”: An Upate

2020 was the two-year anniversary of the Department of Justice’s “China Initiative,” which was intended to increase the focus on the investigation and prosecution of trade secret theft and economic espionage with a Chinese connection under the Economic Espionage Act (“EEA”). According to the DOJ, it charged three economic espionage cases under 18 U.S.C. sec.…

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Supreme Court Ponders Proper Application of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

This article was first published in IPWatchdog.com on December 1, 2020. “On balance, and while it is sometimes difficult to forecast a Supreme Court outcome, the Court seemed extremely troubled by the government’s position.” In Van Buren v. United States, argued yesterday, the Supreme Court has a chance to address how the Computer Fraud and…

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Defending Trade Secrets with Protective Orders

This article was first published in IPWatchdog.com on October 27, 2020. “Plaintiffs must require the entry of a detailed stipulated protective order that adequately addresses the handling of trade secrets during pre-trial but also covers the trial and post-trial proceedings, including any appeal.” Plaintiffs in trade secret cases are often faced with the difficulty of…

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Improper Means’: The Eleventh Circuit’s Very Dubious Trade Secrets Decision in Compulife Software v. Newman (Part II)

This article was first published in IPWatchdog.com on July 14, 2020. “The court’s analysis is flawed, and it relies on authority that is of limited value.” Part 1of this article addressed the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Compulife Software, Inc. v. Newman, __ F.3d __, 2020 WL 2549505, (11th Cir. May 20, 2020) and the court’s…

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A Dubious Decision: Eleventh Circuit Finds Scraping of Data from a Public Website Can Constitute Theft of Trade Secrets (Part I)

This article was first published in IPWatchdog.com on July 2, 2020.https://www.ipwatchdog.com/ “Surely, this is not the first instance in which bots were used to scrape publicly available information from a website. Yet the Eleventh Circuit failed to provide any support for its conclusion…. If support existed for the court’s legal analysis and conclusion, it undoubtedly…

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